How to Fix a Bad Fake Tan

Welcome to this special episode of DermTV and I have with me a guest, a friend, Lucy Danziger, who is also the editor-in-chief of Self Magazine. It’s April, it’s time to start thinking about getting ready for the summer and if you want to get a little jump start on looking a little bit better, there’s no better way to do it than with a self tanner treatment and Lucy’s been gracious enough to share with us today her recent experience with Self Tanners.

Well, as Dr. Schultz says, one of the things women like is to be a little bronze in anticipation of bathing suit season. So whenever I go to Florida or on spring break I like to get a spray on tan. This time I got a little too much tan. Now I believe in the spray tan because for someone who’s blonde like me I don’t like to go to the beach and look pale, I do like to have a little bronzing but Anna, whose brilliant, at Rita Houzan uses a very organic formula and it gets darker overnight. So I woke up this morning with too much tan so I said to Dr. Schultz this is a real issue for women, I’ve heard from women who don’t want to go to the tanning spray on lady, what if I turn orange? Or they don’t want to use a self tanner because they think it’ll look fake. There’s always that danger whenever you change Mother Nature, you’re going to look a little bit fake. So I said to Dr. Schultz, you know I want women to get a spray tan or a fake tan but what do you do if it goes a little too orange or a little too brown, which is what happened to me. What do you do?

I’m happy to tell you this is an easy fix. If your tan becomes a little too dark from a self tanner because the basis of how a self tanner works is it stains the dead cells on the surface of your skin and those dead cells, with the extra darkening can be removed very easily with exfoliation. The exfoliation, which means taking off the dead cells, can be done either with a granular cleanser, a granular abrasive cleanser or it can be done with gentle glycolic pads used on a regular basis or you can even come into a dermatologist office and have a superficial lunchtime glycolic peel, it doesn’t really make your skin peel but all of these mechanisms will gradually remove that extra darkening and restore a more natural looking color. One thing though that we have to stress, even if you have this tan from a bottle or a spray-on, it offers you no protection against ultra-violet light and you still need your same sunscreen with an SPF of between 15 and 30 with UVA protection.

So the one thing that SELF wants you to know is, if you insist on being bronze, make it a self tan. That is the only safe tan and still use your SPF. Thanks Dr. Schultz.

One of the reasons that people shy away from self tanners is that they're afraid of a bad result. Good news: if you get a botched fake tan, there are ways to fix it. Join Dr. Schultz and his special guest, Lucy Danziger, Editor-in-Chief of Self Magazine as they discuss how to repaid a bad self tan.